Compost Cab is partnering with Ethical Electric, a progressive clean energy company and certified B Corp that provides 100% clean, local wind power to its members. Switching is fast & easy - you'll still get the same bill, and the same service, over the same wires. All that changes is that instead of powering your home with dirty energy, including like oil, gas, or coal -- and funding the dirty politics that goes with it -- you will be supporting 100% local, renewable sources with your power bill. They also work to source as much energy as possible from new wind and solar farms and donate 1% of revenue to progressive organizations, at their customers’ direction. Join us and make the switch!

We're proud to help our subscribers and partners reduce waste and build a healthier, more sustainable local food system, one bag of food scraps at a time. But we know that composting is just one piece of the larger sustainability puzzle, and so we're always on the lookout for like-minded people and companies that we can share with our community of composters. UPDATE: This promotion has been overtaken by events outside of our control. Clean Currents informed us this morning that they are unable to add new customers at this time. This created the opportunity for us to partner with Ethical Electric to offer the Compost Cab community an easy way to use its power for good.

The Compost Bandit is at it again! In a pre-dawn raid earlier this week, the same guerilla composter who was caught on camera stealing compostables from a bin barely a month ago was caught on camera a second time. He took food scraps from the same bin, in the same alley, just a couple of miles from the White House in DC. Who IS this guy?

This Thanksgiving, the DCJCC's green bean casserole will be a little greener. On November 25th and 26th, we'll be collecting all the compostables associated with Everything But the Turkey, an annual volunteer event that prepares 20,000 servings worth of Turkey Day side dishes! Instead of heading to a landfill and emitting methane into the air, we'll bring the scraps to one of our local farm partners, where they'll become fertile new soil! In addition, as a thank you for their efforts in this season of thanks, we'll be offering all EBTT volunteers a special discount on subscriptions to Compost Cab’s pioneering weekly compostables collection service.

We're proud to announce that we’ve teamed up with DC Central Kitchen to do some good this post-Halloween season. As we always say, composting is not just about waste reduction. It's about food production. So we're excited to have the opportunity to leverage our compost collection infrastructure to directly enable food production by providing the chefs at DCCK with freshly rescued pumpkins. And you can help!

One of Compost Cab's home subscribers has a motion-triggered camera set up behind their house. Imagine their surprise late last week when they discovered that someone had stolen their food scraps. Not the bin. Not even the compostable liner we use to keep the bin clean. Just the food scraps. The photos lead us to one conclusion: this dude is making compost!

The programs that didn't make it into the fiscal cliff farm bill extension deal are the ones that support the sort of small, multi-crop growers that are the cornerstone of the local food movement. So that's the bad news.

The good news? It's only a nine-month extension. The full five-year $500 billion reauthorization that passed the Senate by a wide, bi-partisan margin back in June died in the Republican-controlled House. So the farm bill will be in play again in 2013. Happy new year! Let's get our heads in the game and make sure local ag, and urban ag in particular, get a bigger piece of the pie.

The notion that increases in the marginal tax rate are make-or-break for small businesses is absurd. No self-respecting entrepreneur is going to stunt their own growth or curtail hiring or place a limit on profitability because it might push them into a higher tax bracket. Let's get past this noise and focus on what really matters. How can government best help entrepreneurs and small business? Help us reduce friction. That's my wish for 2013. Starting and growing a business is hard. Government can make it just a little bit easier. This isn't just for Congress or the federal government. State and local governments need to get with the program, too.

Yesterday, Washington, DC Mayor Vincent Gray announced $4.5 million in grants to city agencies as part of his Sustainable DC Budget Challenge. Here's what got us all jazzed: more than 30% of the grant total -- $1.4 million -- is being allocated to urban ag!

Compost Cab has been a proud and active participant in the Sustainable DC process for more than a year. We've been promoting the importance of farm-to-table-to-farm, and highlighting the social and economic benefits that accrue to a community that composts as part of an infrastructure that supports urban agriculture. This is our mission. It's why we do what we do. And to have the city prioritize this vision, and allocate real resources to it, well, it's just awesome.

It's been a long-time coming, but we're proud to announce that we are finally ready to welcome Compost Cab charter subscribers in Baltimore! We'll launch with as few as 50 subscribers, but we hope we can do better than that. It only takes two minutes to create your account, and you'll be up and composting in no time! Thanks in advance for your support, Baltimore. We look forward to working with you to build a greener, healthier, more sustainable city, one bag of food scraps at a time.

Composting is not just about waste reduction. It's about food production. It's kind of a mantra around here. The story in today's paper may be about Compost Cab, but we're really just a hook. The story is really about changing the way we think about local food systems, and building more just, equitable, sustainable alternatives. So if you haven't done so already, please take the time to share our story. Every time it gets picked up in the press or tweeted or blogged or facebooked or whatever, it's another small step in pursuing real change.

Compost Cab is a finalist in the TEDxManhattan Challenge. We're vying for the opportunity to speak at TEDxManhattan in February. Speaking at TEDxManhattan would be an extraordinary opportunity to talk about how fundamentally important sustainable, scalable, community composting is to the food system.

The world is fraught with challenges for any small business, but particularly a new, innovative service in a fast-evolving space. We work hard to build toward and execute a plan that avoids unnecessary roadblocks, but there are challenges we know we need to plow through: 1) Municipal composting is coming. 2) Composting capacity is limited. 3) The regulatory environment is fluid.

There are easier ways to earn a living than as an entrepreneur. But I can’t imagine anything more rewarding. I’ve been willing – eager! – to put myself out there over and over and over again. Because I love creating something from nothing. I love the process of taking an idea and turning it into something real. I love the thrill of telling the story, of getting people – potential customers, employees, investors – to want to be a part of something new and different and special. I love building great products and services that make people’s lives better.

Our next minimum viable product, currently in development, will give us two things: (1) the scalable tools we need on the back end to efficiently manage an expanding subscriber base, and (2) the ability to enable people to self-organize community composting through Compost Cab. The grant will be used to take some of the risk out of these existing investments, and to finance a business plan that includes white-labeling the Compost Cab “toolkit” for use by people in cities everywhere!

Making it easier for people to compost is part of our mission precisely because of its benefits to the community. We like to think of composting as a Trojan horse for sustainability writ large. Washington DC recently put together a 20-year sustainability plan that identified 11 distinct goals. Our efforts benefited nine of them. Composting touches everything.

“What if we could take our garbage and grow food in it?” That’s the question I asked my 7-year old daughter and 6-year old son two years ago. Then I watched their eyes light up, and I knew we were onto something. Compost Cab is in the magic business. We take food waste and turn it into food.

This spring, we participated in a competition called Mission: Small Business, sponsored by Chase and Living Social. Since we try to be as transparent as possible, we thought we'd post our (lightly edited) answers here.